I love thinking about the future. I love thinking about what’s beyond Earth.

As I took this photo of last night’s near-lunar eclipse, I was filled with awe.

We believe the universe is knowable. That with enough rockets and enough time, we can colonize our galaxy.

Me? I’m not convinced.

Why?

On the cosmic scale, traveling at the speed of light (which, by the way, is physically impossible so far as we know) is a STANDSTILL.

We believe that traveling at the speed of light means stars will fly past us like ludicrous speed from Spaceballs.

In reality? Traveling at the speed of light out in space would be indistinguishable from not traveling at all. No stars move. No galaxies get closer. Completely parked.

To achieve the effect of Star Trek–style visuals, we would actually need to move more like 1,000,000,000,000,000 times the speed of light.

One quadrillion times the speed of light.

The fact that it would take us 40 minutes to get to Jupiter in our current solar system at the speed of light (again, so far impossible) tells us everything we need to know about how incomprehensibly large space is.

Earth is a spaceship.

It’s our spaceship.

Our dreams are on this planet, not in colonizing what might be out there.